Heresiarch; The Green Delusion

Sometimes I let myself get lulled into thinking that the reason magic, superstition, and general all-around woowoo persist is because people are just stupid. The real problem, unfortunately, is that even people far smarter than me have trouble accepting facts that make them uncomfortable--and conversely, will bend over backwards to defend a satisfying, comforting idea regardless of its veracity.

The most comforting word in the modern zeitgeist, I think, is "nature." When we think of nature, we think of beauty and perfection, untouched by corrupt human artifice. Natural means healthy and delicious fruits and veggies--not mushrooms that make you battle invisible mice for an hour and then die. Nature is pure, unsullied--not poisonous or septic or, y'know, literally made of dirt. Anything natural is good, and anything unnatural is bad.

Of course, "natural" is more than a meaningless word--it is, in the modern world, a marketing term. In reality, most of what we eat qualifies as "unnatural" in some way, because we've been eating so-called "frankenfood"--that is, genetically modified crops and livestock--for thousands of years. Maize for example, is near-inedible in its natural state--wild corn has to be soaked in lye and pounded into a pulp to make a sort of awful, mealy paste before anyone can digest the damn thing. The potato and the tomato are both relatives of the Nightshade, and it took decades, maybe centuries, to breed variants that reliably failed to kill the eater. All of these plants are only on the menu today because the ancient Americans used their science (Gasp!) to cultivate them into proper foodstuffs.

Organic food is no different from kosher food--it's made by the same big corporations on the same huge factory-farms as regular food, but with less efficient production methods in order to accommodate an ideology. When you buy organic, or pass up superior GM products in favor of the "natural" alternative, what you're really doing is paying extra money for a shoddy product that makes you feel good because you're making a sacrifice for your ideology--in other words, you're not buying a product, you're buying an image. You are engaging in an act of worship.

Worse, because organic foods are so much less efficiently produced and shipped than GM and other foods that get slapped with the "franken-" prefix, they have a much, much bigger carbon footprint than proper food does. Organic food is not a green product--it is a luxury product that makes the consumer feel good about themselves because we can remain ignorant of how much more rainforest is bulldozed to support free-range cattle, how many millions starve because we'd rather feel like Mother Gaia is smiling at us than let them buy evil mutant science-wheat that can grow in their blasted, barely-arable soil.

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

Those were the words of the late Dr. Norman Borlaug--he pioneered the genetically modified wheat in question, revolutionizing global food production and saving, to date, about a billion lives. And no, when I say a billion, I'm not using that number in a hyperbolic sense--literally one billion people, give or take a few hundred thousand, are alive today who would have starved to death or been killed over food if they had not had access to the fruit of Dr. Borlaug's crimes against nature. This makes him, in any quantitative or objective sense of the term, the greatest man who has ever lived.

Which brings me to the real point of this rant/sermon.

Many religions venerate people who perform astounding acts of faith--martyrs, crusaders, and miracle workers who validate the preexisting dogma of the religion in question through their works. Jehovians call them saints and prophets. The Dharmic family--Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhs and Jains, and so forth--has a whole host of avatars and Bodhisattvas, and like the Abrahamic faiths each religion squabbles with the others for ownership of them.

We will not do this. The Antagonistic Order of Prometheus Lucifer has no holy writ, no dogma, no Truth save the First and Only--"All that is sacred must burn." The commandments I prescribe are jokes, the rituals elaborate farce, and the body of canon itself transcends the form of parody religion to become, perhaps, the world's first troll religion.We will not revere men who merely validate what everyone else is thinking--the true model of the Satanic Ideal should be a person who breaks with tradition, creating a new, better path. In the Christian lexicon, those who found heretical movements are known as Heresiarchs--and I can think of no finer title to bestow on those who reject the ignorance and stagnation of Yahweh.

A Heresiarch need not be of the Order--even devout Jehovians may qualify. All that is necessary for entry into the Heresiarchy is that the prospect must be a reformer; an agent of change who shows people a new way of thinking or doing that improves the lives of many in a quantifiable way--preferably while offending everyone who isn't directly benefiting from it. With these qualifications in mind, I feel there are few men in the world who have done more to earn the favor of our dark lord Satan than Dr. Norman Borlaug. And while his rape of Mother Earth has already earned him a Nobel Peace Prize, a Padma Vibhushan, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Congressional Gold Medal, a Public Welfare Medal, a National Medal of Science, forty-nine honorary degrees, twenty two honorary academic fellowships, and six academic institutions and a street in Mexico named after him, I'm sure that if he had a soul, it would rest easier knowing that he also has the official approval of a sporadically-updated Satanist blog that nobody reads.

His feast day is July 30th. Go wild. Hail Satan.

In the next, long-delayed Letters from Amenti: I explain what the hell I've been talking about for the last year and a half. The Nature of the Plague; Or, There Is No God and We Must Kill Him.